Ars reviews the Palm Pre, part 2: the webOS experience

In this second installment of our Palm Pre review, we go in-depth on the …

Dialer

The Pre's dialer app is the one place where I really miss the iPhone. First off, it needs a "Favorites" page for commonly dialed contacts that it can default to. As big as I am on the keyboard search, I really just want to dial a very small selection of numbers, so I hope Palm puts this into a future update.

On launching the dialer, you can immediately begin dialing a number via the on-screen keypad or the built-in keyboard. If you want to search contacts, you'll have to tap inside the "Enter number" region at the top, which will take you to your contacts list.

If I started typing in a name, you'd see numbers for all the matching contacts.

Seriously, Palm, please give us a "Favorites" screen.

The other part of the dialer that makes me pine for the iPhone is the voicemail—it's back to plain old "press 7 to delete, 9 to save" voicemail for me. This is painful, since I was addicted to Apple's visual voicemail.

(If Google Voice would launch a native Pre app, then this issue would suddenly go away, and it would be visual voicemail + autogenerated transcriptions.)

In other news, the Pre's ringtone selection is horrid—Apple has Palm beat hands-down here. Maybe this is my Apple snobbery talking, but I found them all to be uniformly grating and awful. For the first time in my life, I'll be using a musical ringtone, which is easy enough to set.

In all, the Pre's dialer feels like a bit of an afterthought, but I rarely make mobile voice calls anymore, so I can live with that.

App Catalog

The Palm App catalog is still in Beta, so I don't want to spend a lot of time on it.

As is the case with all live network services where the phone can't cache the data, that search box up top doesn't do live pattern matching. You have to type in a search term and hit the return key to get results back.

Check out the shot above, and notice the tiny blue arrow in the top corner of the AccuWeather icon. That arrow tells you there's a new version of that app for you to download. If you want to update all your apps, you can either find them in the catalog, tap them, and then tap "update," or you can just run the separate "Updates" app to do them all at once.*

* Note: I wasn't initially aware of the updates feature, but initial feedback brought it to my attention.